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Dessert

Country Plum Charlotte

A dessert of stewed plums served over buttered bread in a bowl.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Country Plum Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Stone the plums.

  2. Stew them until soft.

  3. Sweeten the plums to taste.

Assemble the charlotte

  1. Butter the slices of bread.

  2. Lay the buttered bread in the bottom and around the sides of a large bowl or deep dish.

  3. Pour the hot plums into the bowl over the bread.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Plum + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Plum + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together710 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the main fruit body and sweet, tart flavor that forms the filling.
Bread
Forms the firm structure that holds the shape of the charlotte around the fruit.
Butter
Coats the bread, adding richness and helping it brown and crisp slightly.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, bread, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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